POAC Chairman Zitto Kabwe

The Parastatal Organisations Accounts Committee yesterday rejected the Tanzania Bureau of Standards (TBS) financial report, citing twelve shortfalls in the document relating to vehicle inspection and importation of fake products.

POAC Chairman Zitto Kabwe said in Dar es Salaam that the Controller and Auditor General (CAG) report indicated areas which have critical problems among them vehicle inspection procedures and importation of counterfeit goods which the Bureau was yet to work on.

“The committee has rejected this financial report of 2010/11 because we want TBS to work on these areas before submitting it to the committee,” Kabwe said.

Zitto told journalists that the committee has gone through the report and found that it has many shortfalls which needed to be rectified and directed the TBS Board to prepare a new report that will address the shortfalls and submit it to the committee in Dodoma

According to him, the CAG report established that there were some companies which import fake products and that TBS was aware of them but has not taken any legal action or destroyed the goods so as to protect the lives of Tanzanians.

Zitto said the fake goods imported in the country included soaps, fuel, fertiliser and tyres which he said were dangerous to human lives.

Zitto said the committee also established that the government was likely to lose USD 255,000 which would have been collected from abroad in vehicles inspection which he alleged was done by phony companies in Japan, Singapore, Dubai and China.

He said: “The CAG report has showed that TBS had no contract with the companies inspecting the vehicles. Thus it cannot get the 25 percent of the of the 18 million USD paid to the companies by the government.”

“We want TBS to go back and prepare clear explanations that will satisfy the committee members so that we can assist in some areas by giving advice or taking legal action where necessary to ensure that such problems do not persist in this important institution,” he said.

He said among others the Committee has directed TBS to come up with suggestions of a proper system to be used for vehicle inspection so as to save the money which the government is likely to lose because the companies doing the work have no contract with TBS.

Last year the Public Accounts Committee established that between 16,000 and 18,000 vehicles are imported every month, each of which is subjected to an inspection fee of USD 600 before shipment.

The committee noted that TBS is spending USD 129 million equivalent to 219bn/- a year, but if the exercise was conducted locally it would have cost the government between USD 200,000 and 300,000.